Hello everyone... not sure how often this board is updated... but needless to say that I was more than ecstatic to find it yesterday. I have been struggling with burning VCD's to a normal CD-R ever since the salesman roped me into buying a higher end Hitachi DVD player that ' plays home mpeg files ' . Just to avoid that confussion.... yes... i'm sure the player will play VCD's... The problem has been in burning the correct format using my CD-burner. Yesterday I found a copy of Nero 5.5x..... I don't remember the exact version... but it's the latest greatest from their website.. and also managed to register the copy. I've gone through the process several times... and always with the same result. I selected the " Burn Video Disc " option ( I guess the converters for Mpeg2 S-VCD aren't ready as a plugin yet ) and then I configured all the " Create Menu options "... I added all the files to the list to be burned ... As the files were being added... I recieved a message stating that the files weren't in the proper format.. and would I like to re-compile them ( convert them... whatever the lingo was.... ) to a proper format ... so I selected ' RECOMPILE ' for all the files.... no problem.. then I selected the properties of each file that was now in the list ... and named them accordingly.. and also selected the frame to be used as a thumbnail. All seemed to be going well... my CD-burner was detected properly... I set up the Temp storage on a large harddrive I had.. etc... ( I am running Windows 2000 Professional ) and hit ' Burn ' ...

The problem is... it starts recompiling/converting the files... which everyone knows takes FOREVER... BUT .. after a couple hours.. it seems to just finish converting the files.. and then it sits there like a bump on a log.... I CAN'T GET IT TO BURN A CD.... !!!!

I don't know WHAT the hell is wrong... do I have to convert these files before adding them to the list to get Nero to burn a CD ???

Hope somebody has some solutions... cuzz i'm ready to toss this program out and go back to trying to make Adaptec 5.0 platinum work..

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated !

Thanks alot....

-- VCD Bluesman (question4u69@hotmail.com), September 21, 2001

Answers

I heard that having Adaptec 5.0 platinum and Nero both installed on your PC at the same time can cause some weird problems.... Don't know if this is the case with you... but might be worth thinking about....

-- Jhonathan Doe (doe@home.com), September 21, 2001.

First of all are you trying to create a VCD or SVCD? Try creating VCD first and see. Second where did your original files come from and in what form are they? Are they in some AVI format or are they already MPEG? It is best to bring into Nero compliant MPEG-files because, for me, its built-in MPEG encoder seems slower and anyway doesn't produce quality as good as, say, TMPGenc. In some cases, (like what U observed), after lengthy encoding times it just sits there without proceeding to author the wretched VCD. If I were U, I'll independently download and install TMPGenc, encode the source files with it using its VCD-template, and then use the resultant files to create your VCD with Nero. Lastly, Easy CD 5 fights with all its might any other CD-authoring program you will install on the same PC.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), September 22, 2001.

I've fixed this problem... There was something wrong with a couple of the files being converted... so Nero would begin the file conversion process... and then when it hit one of these corrupt files... it would just stop... but Nero is a piece of shit for reporting errors... so I didn't realize what was happening. Of maybe 28 files.... 3 were bad... so after waiting for about 2 hours EACH time this happened.. I found which files were messed up... removed them from the list... and then Nero was able to finish the conversion..... Once it got past this conversion stage... it burnt the CD no problem.... I tried using Tmpeg to convert these files later.. and I had a similar problem.... Tmpeg would begin creating the standardized VCD OR SVCD file of these corrupted mpegs... but then it would all of a sudden stop and the program would shutdown.

Anyway... Seems like loading the template for VCD or SVCD in Tmpeg and converting EACH file individually... and waiting the HOURS it takes to make these things is the only way to go.

Later.

-- Jhonathan Doe (doe@home.com), September 24, 2001.